A wonderful interface to the MAD mp3 decoding engine, which has allowed me to get waveforms from MP3 files from Perl in a relatively short time. The documentation is not quite as verbose as you might hope, though if you have previous experience of the MAD library then you will no doubt find it quite acceptable.

The only problem I have is that it appears Audio::Mad::Stream cannot actually stream data from a file, but rather requires the whole MP3 in one chunk, which is rather obtrusive when dealing with radio documentaries or symphonies.

See also L<Audio::MPEG>, which also interfaces to MAD, but also requires LAME.